NewsWrap
for the week ending September 28, 2002
(As broadcast on This Way Out program #757, distributed 9-30-02)
[Written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Graham Underhill, Chris Ambidge,
Jason Lin, Rex Wockner, Lucia Chappelle & Greg Gordon]
Anchored by Cindy Friedman & Jon Beaupré
Israel is about to have its first openly gay member of parliament. The
gay-supportive left-wing Meretz Party announced this week that it's selected
long-time civil rights activist Professor Uzi Even to replace a retiring
Member of the Knesset in early November.
Even told the "Jerusalem Post" that, "My joining the Knesset would be a very
important step for every gay. The message is you no longer have to be
ashamed. You can even be elected to the Knesset." His legislative interests
include education, science and technology. He promised to work for gay and
lesbian civil rights, including equal treatment of same-gender couples for
taxation and inheritance.
Israel's powerful religious right immediately denounced the appointment, with
Nissim Zeev of the far-right Shas Party telling a radio audience that Meretz
is "adopting abominations," "making sodomite vermin kosher" and taking "a
further step toward moral deterioration."
But Even told Reuters that, "As far as I am concerned, every person in the
Knesset warrants respect and I will be careful not to cause offense. I hope
they will do the same thing."
The 61-year-old Even is a chemistry professor at Tel Aviv University. His
previous career in military and civilian national security activities ended
when he lost his clearance after coming out. He shared that story with the
Knesset almost a decade ago in a successful lobbying effort to reform the
military's treatment of gays and lesbians. He and his long-time partner Dr.
Amit Kama raised a son together.
But another Israeli gay male couple's son will not be legally recognized as
their adopted child or as a citizen, as the State Prosecutors Office this
week opposed the men's petition in the High Court of Justice. The government
brief said the nation "does not recognize a family unit comprised of parents
of the same sex." The couple of 13 years' standing hold dual
Israeli-American citizenship and adopted the boy from an Asian country while
they were living in the U.S. When they decided to return to Israel two years
ago, Israel's Interior Ministry rejected their application to register the
adoption and grant the boy citizenship. They appealed that rejection to the
court with the help of the group New Family, which claims there's no legal
grounds for the state's position since "family" is not defined in Israeli law.
Some other nations continue to make their definitions of "family" more
inclusive.
Most remarkably this week, a public vote in the Swiss canton of Zurich
supported legal recognition of gay and lesbian couples by a landslide 63%.
The referendum was the first of its kind in Switzerland, where only the
canton of Geneva has granted legal status to same-gender couples.
Zurich's measure is much stronger than Geneva's 2001 "Pacts of Civil
Solidarity". Zurich's civil registry will confer status equal to married
couples' with respect to taxation, inheritance, social security benefits,
hospital visitation, and residency rights for foreign partners in binational
relationships. However, the Zurich registry is open only to gay and lesbian
couples of at least six months' standing who live in the canton -- and if
they move elsewhere, the registration terminates.
A joint statement by the Swiss Lesbian Organization, the gay group Pink
Cross, and FELS -- Friends and Parents of Lesbians and Gays -- hailed the
vote as "historic" and called on the national Government to extend "perfect
equality" to same-gender couples.
In a move that took many by surprise, the Labor Party Government of the
state of Tasmania announced plans to introduce what could become Australia's
most comprehensive and progressive laws affecting couples. Tasmanian
Attorney-General Judy Jackson said the sweeping reforms would amend more than
120 state laws that "discriminate between married and de facto heterosexual
couples on one hand, and same-sex couples and people in significant
relationships on the other." Veteran Tasmanian gay civil rights activist
Rodney Croome believes the bill has a good chance in the state's Upper House
as well as in the Labor-controlled Lower House, where introduction is
expected before year's end.
The U.S. state of California continues to strengthen the legal standing of
its statewide partnership registry. This week Democratic Governor Gray Davis
signed into law the nation's first gay-inclusive comprehensive family leave
program. It expands state disability insurance to allow up to 6 weeks paid
leave to care for a newborn, a newly adopted child, or an ailing family
member, including a domestic partner's biological child. Earlier in
September Davis signed into law a measure to extend registered domestic
partners the same standing as legally married couples to inherit when one
partner dies without leaving a will.
Chances improved for full equal marriage rights for Swedish gays and
lesbians with their success in national elections in mid-September. 5 openly
gay men from 5 different parties will now sit in the national parliament,
while another 27 open gays and lesbians won local posts. The new MPs include
long-time civil rights activists Borje Vestlund of the ruling Social
Democratic Party and incumbent Tasso Stafilidis of the Left Party. Sweden's
gay and lesbian registered partnerships bring very nearly the same legal
rights as traditional marriage, but one of 5 items on the national activist
agenda is the ability to marry under the same statutes as heterosexuals --
something now possible only in the Netherlands.
India's first transgender "hijra" to win elective office is once again
holding her mayoral post in Katni. Elected in January 2000 to a post
reserved for women, Kamla Jaan was ousted last month when a court annulled
her election on the grounds that she's a biological male. She appealed the
ruling, and this week the Madhya Pradesh state high court reinstated her.
The saga will continue with further hearings in that court in November.
An Egyptian appeals court has overturned the convictions of the so-called
"Boulak 4", who had been sentenced to 3 years' imprisonment followed by 3
years' probation for consensual homosexual acts. The Cairo area Boulak
Appeals Court of Misdemeanors cited a lack of evidence against the men,
including the prosecution's failure to even visit the site of the alleged
infraction. International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Program
Director Scott Long said, "These men were unjustly arrested, tortured and
convicted. We have been waiting more than 10 months to hear this news."
But he noted that a retrial is still in progress for 50 men arrested in a
police raid on a gay-friendly Nile riverboat nightclub and added that, "We
continue to receive reports of new waves of arbitrary arrests."
A U.S. federal appeals court for the first time has granted standing to sue
for sex discrimination to a gay man harassed by his male co-workers.
Previously other U.S. appeals courts had rejected claims of anti-gay
discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the federal law which
prohibits workplace sex discrimination. But the most liberal of the federal
appellate courts, the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit, decided 7-to-4 to give
Medina Rene his day in court. Rene claims to have experienced near-daily
physical sexual harassment from his male co-workers over a period of two
years. His former employer, the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, denies those
claims, but has not yet decided whether to appeal the current ruling.
The finding by the full bench of the 9th Circuit reversed decisions by a
trial court and by a divided 3-judge panel of the 9th Circuit itself. However
, the majority was also divided in the rationale for its decision, falling
one vote short of a shared opinion that would have set a binding precedent
for all federal courts in 9 Western states. Five justices joined in an
opinion written by Justice William Fletcher that Rene's sex discrimination
lawsuit should proceed because the harassment against him was specifically
"of a sexual nature." Two others who supported his standing cited Title
VII's prohibition against discrimination based on gender stereotyping. That
theory was acceptable to the minority judges, but they found that Rene had
neither made that argument nor presented evidence to support it. The
dissenting opinion said that Title VII "is not an anti-harassment statute; it
is an anti-discrimination statute against persons in five specific
classifications," and denied that the actions against Rene were motivated by
his sex.
And finally... in German national elections, the ruling "Red-Green"
coalition of Social Democrats and Greens that enacted Life Partnerships for
gays and lesbians won another four years in power. The closest election
since World War II saw the coalition squeak through with a combined vote of
just over 47% as the anti-gay Christian Democrats actually took more votes
than any other single party.
But while the politics were serious business, quite a bit of the campaigning
was fun. The gay-supportive Greens used a poster that was based on a
16th-century painting that hangs at the Louvre but showed topless gay and
lesbian couples engaged in pinching their partners' nipples.
Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, thrice divorced, was hit with
the opposition slogan "Three women can't be wrong!" and a film clip of his
third ex-wife saying, "I left my husband -- you can do it too!"